Have You Any Rogues? (9 page)

Grief, and its all-too-familiar blackness, closed in around her.

She’d known better than to listen at the door, for her mother had always said nothing good ever came from eavesdropping, but she had to know what Crispin was going to say to his aunt.

She had to know what was in his heart.

Especially after she’d spent all these years wondering if he had wanted her for marriage or . . .

And it was all as she feared. She was naught but a dalliance after supper to him.

How like a Dale to use their pretty words and lying hearts to get what they wanted.

And here she’d worried over him, cried for him, carried her secret love for him all these years. Felt a traitor for marrying Astbury only because her heart had belonged to another.

That horrible year his aunt had spoken of—it had nearly killed Henrietta. And now she discovered he thought of her merely as a dalliance?

Wretched, lying Dales. Curse them all,
she fumed.

But foremost in her thoughts was how to get as far away from Crispin Dale as she could. She never wanted to see the man again.

And woe to him if he ever did cross her path.

Ill-bred lot indeed! She’d show him exactly how ill-bred she could be.

And in this state of fury and a blinding need to lash out, she raged around a corner and nearly bowled over a tall figure out for an evening stroll.

“Well, well, what have we here?”

Henrietta glanced up to find Lord Michaels stubbing out a cheroot, grinning at her unlikely arrival. “I had thought you weren’t—”

It really didn’t matter what he was going to say, for Henrietta needed to know something very important. “Lord Michaels, am I a dalliance to you?”

“A wha-a-t?” he managed, taking a step closer to her, taking in her tumbled appearance, his eyes narrowing.

“You heard me, a dalliance?”

His features shifted from the rakish demeanor of a few moments earlier to an expression Hen hadn’t thought him capable of.

“No,” he said, simply and plainly. “Never, my dear Lady Astbury. I’d carry you to Gretna Green this very night if I thought—”

And in a very impetuous, Seldon sort of moment, she made the most scandalous decision of her young life.

“Then take me.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

If the wind has changed, so has a Seldon’s heart.

WELL
-
KNOWN
DALE
MAXIM

Owle Park, 1810

C
rispin got up from where he’d been sitting on the steps and paced the short distance across the cellar. “Michaels?! Of all the madcap, idiotic—”

Henrietta held up her hand to stave off the rest of Crispin’s censure. Hadn’t she heard much the same from everyone of consequence in her life since the day she’d made her fateful decision to run off with the fellow?

And they were all correct. It had been a disastrous decision. For her. And for Michaels—whose heart, very much like her own, had belonged to someone else.

What a pair they’d made.

“I will never understand why you married that bounder,” Crispin said, taking a bottle off the shelf and examining it.

Hen sighed. It was all so complicated. More so now than it had been then. “You know why.”

Crispin stalked back toward her, bottle in hand. “That doesn’t mean I understand. If only you’d trusted—”

“Trust? A Dale?” she shot back. “It has been drummed into me since birth that trusting a Dale is like trusting the devil.”

“As faithless as a
Seldon,
” he shot back.

Hen flinched a bit. “I was willing to look past your name.”

“Look past my name?” He set the wine aside and crossed his arms over his chest, stubbornly defiant. “It would have been
your
name.”

She rose to her feet to face him, unwilling to let him tower over her. “And that of our child’s,” she snapped back before she could stop herself, her darkest secret spilling out. She clapped her hand over her mouth, as if that could put the words back where they belonged—locked tightly in her heart.

Yet there they were. Spat right out in the open.

In the cool shadows of the cellar, her secret brought a light that left them both frozen and blinking at its stark glare.

Crispin’s eyes narrowed. “Our what?” he asked in a cold, quiet voice.

“You heard me,” she said, wishing yet again she could learn to curb her impetuous tongue. Then she repeated it, this time a little more gently, for the memory was, even after all this time, still raw. “Your child.”

Crispin shook his head. “How could that be—we only—”

“Yes, once. But that was all it took.” She turned away from him, wishing she’d never blundered into
this
mire.

“But you were married,” he argued, “to that bounder. How could you even think—”

She whirled back around. “Think that my baby was yours? I knew it for certain.” She laughed a bit. “Michaels was no bounder. Contrary to what everyone thought of him, he was actually quite harmless.”

“Harmless?” Crispin’s expression was incredulous. “The rumors I’ve heard of his exploits—ruinous deeds that aren’t fit for a lady’s ears, not even those of his widow.” He said all this while wagging his finger at her.

Henrietta blew out a long sigh. “If you are referring to the gel in that Southwark stew, she was paid to tell that story. As were countless others.” She reached over and gathered up the wayward pup, settling the little mutt into her arms. When it looked up at her with sleepy eyes and nestled closer, content with being safe and sound, Henrietta smiled.

Exactly like Michaels. A wild, reckless reputation, when in truth the man had been like this pup—content to sleep beside her, but nothing more. She’d been his perfect foil. A widow from a family infamous for its passionate nature, with a lady such as Henrietta beside him, who would ever suspect . . .

“He never . . . We never . . .” She hated to say any of this, for one hint otherwise would ruin the baron’s perfectly crafted reputation. And yet . . .

Didn’t this man before her deserve some portion of the truth?

She closed her eyes, yet that only brought a myriad of memories—stark images from a long ago night. Hours of labor. The midwife’s grave expression. Michaels’s pale glances. And the silence . . . that horrible silence when there should have been lusty cries announcing a new life.

Crispin’s eyes widened with shock. “You expect me to believe he never—”

Her hand fluttered in a distracted wave at him. “Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying. I knew the child I carried was yours because I never was a true wife to Michaels. He never wanted me like that. Me or any other woman.”

Crispin gaped at her, that is until his expression changed, slowly, a dual understanding dawning in his eyes.

But one only really mattered.

“A child,” he said as if testing the words.

“Yes.
Our
child.” Henrietta hugged the puppy to her chest and bit back the tears that came as she remembered the little, still form that had been quietly wrapped in a swaddling blanket by a grief-stricken Michaels and taken from her.

Suddenly even the warmth from the puppy in her arms was too much, and she gently set it back in the basket, dashing at the tears forming far too quickly for her to quell with her last remaining bit of resolve.

But this time she wasn’t alone.

“Ours, Calypso?”

She nodded, biting back tears. “A daughter.”

He crossed the space separating them and quickly wrapped her in his steady, sturdy embrace.

“My dearest Calypso, why didn’t you tell me?” he whispered into her ear as his hands stroked her hair, smoothed away the shivers of cold, icy memories of that horrible, wrenching night.

She clung to him, as she might have then. Sought the solace that was so overdue. “I tried. Don’t you remember?”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

When a Dale comes to call, count the silver and your daughters.

A
SELDON
WARNING

London, 1808

“T
onight, Crispin,” Aunt Damaris reminded him for about the hundredth time as he helped her down from her carriage. “Lady Portia Claybourne is perfect—even if she isn’t a Dale.” She glanced around at the other arriving guests and nodded at an acquaintance. “Despite that misfortune,” she continued, “the Claybournes are well respected, and as the daughter of the Earl of Lindsey, she will grace Langdale with a regal air that has long been missing.”

Crispin ignored that jibe. For his own mother hadn’t been a Dale—or the daughter of an earl. Or even a viscount. The lowly offspring of a poor baronet, she’d won his father’s heart, and together they’d enjoyed a bright and happy union.

One Crispin had been holding out to find since he’d reached his majority.

“Lady Portia Claybourne,” Aunt Damaris sighed yet again as they climbed the stairs into the ballroom. The way his aunt said the chit’s name made it sound as if the earl’s eldest daughter was the salvation of their family.

Which she wasn’t, Crispin would point out. The Dales needed neither her dowry nor her lofty connections.

“Yes, indeed, Crispin, it is time to put all your reckless ways aside. Forget Paris and see to your obligations.”

While his aunt was correct that it was time for him to find a bride, it hadn’t been his imprisonment in Paris that had left him “reckless,” as Aunt Damaris liked to refer to his roguish reputation about town, but the returning to England, the being tricked and deceived by his Calypso, trapped by her siren ways and left adrift when she fled to another’s embrace that had been his undoing.

He’d left Bletcher House done with dreams and hopes and wishes and had turned instead to amorous pursuits, gambling and fast horses, hoping to leave behind what had happened.

Forget
her
.

He’d spent three reckless years trying to shut her out of his life, gaining a reputation as one of the
ton
’s most unrepentant rogues. Yet eventually even the most beautiful and willing ladies of London lost their luster, their tempting shine, and Crispin faced the simple truth: It was time to forget and marry another.

Still, Crispin found himself loathing the prospect ahead, especially since her family was expecting it. His aunt certainly was. And so, most likely, was Lady Portia.

All that was left was to form the words and see the deed done.

A proposal of marriage.

How hard could it be to get married? Henrietta Seldon had done it twice now—with nary a glance behind her.

Crispin cringed. He had to stop thinking about
her
.

His Calypso. His siren. The golden-haired beauty who haunted his dreams.

But when he entered the Knolleses’ ballroom, his practiced gaze sweeping the room, to his shock and dismay, he found himself staring right at the very lady he vowed to forget every single day.

Then again it was demmed hard not to see her, for she stood all alone, as if Society had drawn a wide circle around her and decreed that no one cross that boundary—for every lady in the room was obviously giving her the cut direct.

And yet proudly, and all alone, she faced them down with her usual grace and nobility—as if she hadn’t noticed in the least that she was being shunned.

“Upon my soul!” Aunt Damaris gasped when she too spied Henrietta. “Not her!”

That was all his aunt had to say.
Her
.

For when Aunt Damaris said it, it came out as if she was choking on the devil.

For in his Aunt Damaris’s estimation, Lady Henrietta Seldon was probably as close to hell as one could gain in this world.

Certainly Henrietta was creating havoc in his heart, tangling him up and leaving him doubting his own resolve.

I don’t care about you anymore,
he would tell her.

But it was a lie, nonetheless. And she’d know it.

Always would be, he realized as he watched with a twinge of jealousy as Lord Juniper strolled right up to Henrietta and greeted her as an old friend. That was until the man’s mother came furiously barreling through the crowded room and tugged her besotted son away.

“The fool!” Aunt Damaris spat out. “Why he continues to loiter after her when he knows—why, everyone knows—just what a ruinous jade she is!” Then she turned to Crispin, her eyes narrowed and searching. “Come now, Crispin,” she said, nudging him out of his spellbound state—literally with the sharp end of her fan. “There is Lady Portia. How lovely she looks. Like a fair, blessed angel.” She towed him in that direction. “Don’t you agree?”

She asked this as they came to stand before his chosen paragon and he found himself forcing a smile to his lips.

It hadn’t been this hard before.

Before. . .

Crispin couldn’t help himself; he glanced over his shoulder in her direction.

His long-lost Calypso.

Demmit, whyever had she run off with Michaels? He was of half a mind to stalk over there and demand an explanation. He deserved that much at the very least, didn’t he?

“So you’ve noticed who is here,” Lady Portia’s mother said with a decided sniff of disapproval. “Whatever is she thinking, coming out in Society? And with her husband barely cold.”

“Cold?” Crispin asked. “Michaels is dead?”

Beside him he could feel his aunt flinch, and he glanced over at her—just quick enough to see her try her best to hide her guilt.

She’d known. Of course she had. This was Aunt Damaris.

“Yes, cold. Poor, dear Lord Michaels,” Lady Lindsey was saying. “Fell from his horse and died—not three months ago. They say she drove him to it.” This was followed by a significant glance over at the newly widowed Lady Michaels. “How can she appear in public like that? And in a red gown, no less! Does she think that is proper mourning? Someone should tell Lady Michaels . . . no, I can’t even use the word
lady
in the same sentence as that creature.”